As we commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, I find myself pausing not only to honor the nearly 3,000 innocent people who lost their lives, but also to remember the courage and sacrifice of the first responders and the families whose lives were forever changed.
September 11th changed our nation forever. Yet, as the years pass, this terrible event inevitably becomes part of history—just as the statues commemorating World War I, that stand in public squares today, can sometimes go unnoticed by generations who have no personal connection to the events they represent.
Today, roughly one-third of Americans were not yet born when September 11, 2001 occurred. That realization made me stop and look back at that tragic day—not simply as a historic event, but from my own personal perspective.
During the late 1990’s and, during 2000 and 2001, The Ives Group, Architects/Planners was commissioned to design a number of projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. We had two members of our staff permanently stationed in the North Tower, Tower One—the first building struck that morning at 8:46 AM.
Two of my employees could have been in the building that morning.
One had fortunately taken the day off to take his child to college. The other had decided that he would come into work late. He was riding his bicycle toward the World Trade Center when he witnessed American Airlines Flight 11 strike the North Tower and explode.
The aircraft struck the building approximately between the 93rd and 99th floors. Our architectural colleagues were working much lower in the building, on the 73rd floor.
I also had a third employee who was on his way to Tower One carrying a roll of architectural drawings under his arm. He was going to deliver them to the Port Authority’s architectural department.
I can remember his phone call to me as if it were yesterday.
I was watching the horrible news on television as the events were unfolding when the phone rang.
“Hey, Joel! I’m changing trains in Hoboken. It looks like a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center. Should I continue on to deliver the drawings?”
I responded, “I think you better turn around and come back to the office!”
He did.
In the days that followed, The Ives Group supplied the Port Authority with many of the architectural drawings that had been destroyed in the collapse but fortunately still existed in our files. Those drawings became part of the enormous effort to reconstruct records that had been lost that day.
We were subsequently honored to be assigned to work with the Port Authority on the first new building constructed in the complex after the attacks—a building designed to house critical electrical equipment.
In a small way, that meant that the Ives team had a role in designing the first new building to rise at the World Trade Center site after the debris had been cleared.
I remember one particular design challenge. We had to figure out how heavy electrical equipment would be lifted from the train tracks below into the new building. Our solution was to provide large openings in the floor and structural hoist beams so that the equipment could be lifted directly into the building.
The photograph below shows our building under construction on August 25, 2003.
Today, that building is largely hidden beneath and among the much larger World Trade Center complex that followed.
Twenty-five years later, it is easy to look at the World Trade Center as a collection of magnificent buildings, memorials, transportation facilities, and public spaces. But for those of us who were there, or who had colleagues, friends, or family directly connected to what happened, the site carries another meaning.
Sometimes it is good to stop and think about the major events of the past—not simply as history, but as something that happened within our own lives.
And perhaps the greatest realization is how fortunate we are to be able to look back, remember, and tell the story.
Because we are still here.